I'm Bob Garfield with your regularly scheduled midweek OTM podcast.

This weekend in a series of tweets, President Trump both disclosed and scrapped secret talks in

Camp David with the Taliban.

But the president canceled the secret summit after Thursday's suicide bombing at a Kabul checkpoint,

killing a dozen people, including one U.S. soldier.

Democrats and some Republicans criticizing the White House for the time and place of the meeting,

especially just days before 9-11.

Of course, the Taliban did not perpetrate 9-11, but they did offer safe haven in Afghanistan

to al-Qaeda, whose hijackers turned passenger airplanes into bombs in the most deadly act of terrorism

on U.S. soil.

A few weeks later, the United States invaded the Central Asian crossroads, whose history has been one of occupation.

Today we focus on Afghanistan, but the battle is broader.

Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground.

If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocence, they have become outlaws and

murderers themselves, and they will take that lonely path at their own peril.

The whole world understood, or almost the whole world, one country that was unclear about the U.S. mission

and its motives was Afghanistan itself.

According to a 2010 study by the International Council on Security and Development,

during the height of fighting in Helmand and Kandahar, 92% of southern Afghan males there had never heard of 9-11.

That staggering statistic caught the eye of Stars and Stripes reporter J.P. Lawrence, himself in a rock war veteran, and to mark the anniversary of 9-11, last year he decided to conduct his own survey.

We talked to him at the time about two questions he asked Afghans from different parts of the

country.

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